First day!

Today was the first day.  I was super excited as I began my bike ride commute to the office.  It was a good ride (minus the one hill at the beginning that is a bit bigger than I remembered from yesterday's ride).  It was really cool to be riding during rush hour with MANY other cyclists and not so cool to see SO many cars lined up in traffic.  But it made me happy to pass them all on my bike!

Anyways, today was filled with a bunch of ice breakers and paperwork and going over rules and creating a group contract.  Most of it very interesting, some incredibly boring.  My team (the 'Growing Roots AmeriCorps Team') is made up of 12 people from all over the country who have all come to Seattle to work with homeless youth.  Four of us are serving at Seattle Youth Garden Works, and the rest are at other agencies throughout the city.  We are a very interesting group of people, but I think that I am going to like everyone.  This whole week is training/orientation with the whole team, and then next week is the start of our 'normal' schedule.  Each Monday we will meet with the whole team for training and debriefing and service projects.  And then Tuesday through Friday we are each at our respective sites.

I am excited about tomorrow.  We are meeting in downtown Seattle and are doing a scavenger hunt around the city via bus.  We don't really know much about what is going on, but our supervisor said that we will be getting a taste of what it is like for the youth who live on the streets.  Specifically she said that we will get a feel for what it will be like to try and get things done without the proper resources.  She also challenged us, if we feel comfortable, to not eat breakfast tomorrow morning so that we can do this activity with a feeling of hunger, similar to most of the youth who most likely do not eat breakfast.

I also discovered that one of my teammates lives about 3 blocks from me and he biked to the office as well.  He told me that there is a different way to go that avoids the big hill.  This was good news to me.  So we biked back to the north side of the city together and we're gonna meet tomorrow morning to commute together again.  Unfortunately he is not at my site, so we won't be able to do this often.

I am very exhausted.  All the excitement and the nerves and the emotional energy to meet lots of new people and the energy to start a new job and go through training and take in lots of information and the physical energy to bike about 20 miles (when I am not in the best biking shape yet) and just all of these new things that are very stimulating and make me think like crazy.  They are all really good and I am happy about ALL of them, but also very tiring.  The past few days have been pretty calm with not much to do except explore.  And then today was just a lot in one day.  So good though.  I am very hopeful for all that is to come.